While we applaud Starbucks for their effort to engage a topic that many seek to avoid, and while their efforts seem well-intentioned, we, as a national racial justice organization, with a name similar to the hashtag used in the campaign feel compelled to say: as a nation, we need more.

I thought nothing more about the disagreement as I left the kitchen to put the dogs out. But the next morning I was startled to see that "the dress" was dominating social media. What had started as a question on Tumblr was now a national obsession. How could some people see black and blue where I saw gold and white?

Given that the vast majority of Americans cannot identify North Korea on a map, or the name of its leader, the very idea that a major film studio would sanction the production of a movie whose plot is based on the assassination of Kim Jong-un is just plain silly.

All were willing to step up to make a difference, to lead when it could be dangerous, and to let their lives be shining examples for others. We should remember them when we face stormy and cloudy weather in our national life and become bright rainbows of hope like them.

"Each day, more than half the world's adult population read a daily newspaper: 2.5 billion in print and more than 800 million in digital form," according to the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers (WAN-IFRA).

Having gone through several music programs and with friends still attending music programs, I can tell you that these ranking systems absolutely fail to address what is important as a developing musician seeking to make a career as a performer.

USA Today splashed across its June 18, 2014, front page the breathless headline, "Unfit for Flight" to dramatize the deadly enterprise of flying general aviation aircraft (small airplanes). There is only one problem: Nearly every inference about aviation in the article is wrong.

There are a lot of reasons why Americans don't know how the law affects them or why they believe things about Obamcare that aren't true. One of the biggest reasons is the failure of many in the media to provide anything other than the most superficial coverage.

On June 3, 1989 I arrived in Beijing to cover a student-led pro-democracy movement in Tiananmen Square. Less than an hour later, soldiers made their first demand: "Leave the square or we will shoot to kill."

We hear so much these day about banks and companies that have become so large they are unable to manage themselves -- that there are so many layers of bureaucracy that illegal and unethical behavior can go undetected for years.

By most accounts, veterans receive good care once they are in the VA system. But after a decade of wars, including Iraq and Afghanistan, and with thousands of Vietnam veterans, demand on the VA has grown enormously.